[Sephardi Jews are a Jewish ethnic division whose ethnogenesis and emergence as a distinct community of Jews traces back to immigrants originating in the Israelite tribes of the Middle East]
Ben-Zion Netanyahu believed that traditional Sephardic Jews were less Jewish than their Ashkenazi compatriots. Along with his academic peers Yitzhak (Fritz) Baer and Ben-Zion Dinur, two men who also had an important role to play in the emergence of Jewish identity in Israel through their writing of national curriculum standards, Netanyahu saw the Sephardim as being effete intellectuals who cared more for sophistication and the good life than for Judaism........
Not surprisingly, by critically comparing the two opposing views we can see echoes of the bitter dispute waged over Zionism in the context of contemporary Jewish identity. The establishment in Zionist thought of the “New Jew” was also part and parcel of a process of “semantic assimilation” to Gentile values that sought to eviscerate the Jewish tradition. Transcending the essential values of Torah Judaism most accurately formulated in Maimonides’ teaching, Zionism was firmly intent on creating a very different understanding of what it means to be Jewish.
In both cases – in Spain and in Zionism – the net effect was to strongly reject the past and its traditions in order to promulgate values quite different from the ethics and pieties of the venerable Jewish heritage.
Ben-Zion Netanyahu and his Zionist cohorts sought to stigmatize rational and scientific thought as not being Jewish while valorizing mystical and anti-rational values as being authentically Jewish. This revaluation has had a decisive – and deleterious – impact on contemporary Judaism......
This integration of Jewish irrationalism into the very heart of contemporary Zionist thought is due in large part to the views of scholars like Netanyahu who successfully made their ideas part of the Israeli educational system and the larger civic culture of the nation.
It is little wonder then that the net result of this intellectual integration has been a culture that is predicated on militancy, as the following obituary states: “Throughout, his views were relentlessly hawkish: he argued that Jews inevitably faced discrimination that was racial and not religious, and that efforts to compromise with Arabs were futile.”
Living in an enchanted world where anti-rational beliefs are the norm, Netanyahu understood the Arab-Israeli conflict through the lenses of the magical and occult. There can never be a rational solution to the conflict because rationalism is anti-Jewish. The mystical is easily translated into the violent. It is an enchanted place where no rational political solution can ever take place. The sword, not the word, is of decisive importance in Netanyahu’s fatalistic epistemology.
Dispensing with the rational, Ben-Zion Netanyahu firmly believed in a deeply radical Right Wing vision of Zionism that was predicated on the values of violence and militancy. His intimate association with the fanatical Revisionist leader Vladimir Jabotinsky spoke to his understanding of politics as an outgrowth of a chillingly occult process.
His benighted and inaccurate scholarship saw the Spanish Inquisition as an existential contest between incompatible essentialized racial identities. This contest was seen through the prism of a primordial tribal agon that could only ever be resolved through death and destruction of the enemy.
That this ideology was – contrary to the vain protestations of his son Benjamin – given importance in elite circles of Israeli political thinking is sad testimony for a Zionism whose roots are part and parcel of a way of seeing and interpreting Jewish history that firmly negates the rich Jewish culture of Sephardic Jewry.
The elevation and eventual triumph of Ashkenazi Judaism in Israeli society is marked by a tradition of anti-rationalism that finds its expression in militant zealotry that often spills over into a blind fanaticism and a siege mentality. It is a culture of suicidal Judaism that remains paranoid and sees itself as being under endless persecution. It is a Judaism that can never have common ground with the Gentile world.
Those are the values that Ben-Zion Netanyahu believed in. These values were transmitted in his writings and discussions to his son, and through his son to the Israeli public and world Jewry as a whole. His outsize influence on Israeli politics has made his death an international matter. He was an important personage whose ideas, however offensive they might have been, have taken on a great significance in our understanding not only of medieval history, but of the current struggle between Israeli Jews and Palestinian Arabs.
It is a legacy of tortured thinking and a profound struggle with the most basic ethical values of a Judaism that he sought to aggressively transform into a corrosively militant ideology which continues to be articulated by the current Israeli Prime Minister and his legion of supporters.
David Shasha
The Fierce Anti-Sephardism and Zionist Militant Supremacy of Ben-Zion Netanyahu - David Shasha
July 2014 Update
I originally prepared the following article to mark the passing of Ben-Zion Netanyahu back in 2012.
In the article I do my best to provide a clear understanding of the fanatical anti-Sephardic posture of a man whose role in Israel’s politics has been a very important one because of his son, the current Israeli Prime Minister.
As the current obscene bloodletting in Gaza continues, I believe that it is vital for us to understand the venal ideas of Ben-Zion Netanyahu and their place in the ongoing violence.
Benjamin Netanyahu learned his nihilistic Ashkenazi Jewish fatalism from his father who in turn imbibed it from the racist Vladimir Jabotinsky. The elder Netanyahu, as is well-known, was Jabotinsky’s secretary.
It is this Zionist nihilism which is intrinsic to the brutal policies of the current Israeli government.
For these men it was the blood of the Jewish race that was important above all else. The intellectual, cultural, and moral values of the great Jewish sages were not as critical to this racialist vision as violence and blood. This political philosophy had echoes of racist European movements like Sturm und Drang and Blood and Soil which had, ironically, targeted the Jews for persecution.
Ben-Zion Netanyahu, along with more mainstream Zionists like Ben-Zion Dinur and Yitzhak Baer, believed that the Sephardic acculturation to the Greco-Arabic model of Religious Humanism was an adulterated, impure version of Judaism that could not stand next to the doctrinal “purity” of the great Ashkenazi rabbis and their tradition of martyrs.
Only death could prove fidelity to Judaism. The study of philosophy and science and the writing of literature served to “weaken” the “true” Jewish spirit. Sephardic acculturation during the many centuries of Islamic civilization was seen negatively.
The “return” to Zion – to a Middle East that the Zionists despised – was to be constructed along the lines of this Ashkenazi fatalism and would be drawn up on a crucible of blood that continues to this day and looks to continue forever. Israel today has no idea whether it wants a two-state solution or a one-state solution. It is intent on living in the PILPUL limbo of its own nihilism. One day it supports HAMAS, the next day it targets HAMAS for destruction.
The Jewish State will thus forever be an outsider nation; something that is looking more and more likely as Israel’s aggressive actions are truly making it a pariah state.
The Arab enemy must always be treated with cruelty and venality. It is Jabotinsky’s “Iron Wall” philosophy that permeates the current violence. Women and children are being killed in order to fulfill the Zionist mission of blood and sacrifice......
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Ben-Zion Netanyahu was not just another scholar of Sephardic history. Because he was the father of the current Israeli Prime Minister his views on Jewish history and identity took on an outsize importance. His many years of counsel to his son – one of Israel’s most important politicians – made his own idiosyncratic views of Sephardic Jews and the Spanish Inquisition and their place in the historical Jewish identity a central factor in Israeli political culture.
Ben-Zion Netanyahu believed that traditional Sephardic Jews were less Jewish than their Ashkenazi compatriots. Along with his academic peers Yitzhak (Fritz) Baer and Ben-Zion Dinur, two men who also had an important role to play in the emergence of Jewish identity in Israel through their writing of national curriculum standards, Netanyahu saw the Sephardim as being effete intellectuals who cared more for sophistication and the good life than for Judaism........
Not surprisingly, by critically comparing the two opposing views we can see echoes of the bitter dispute waged over Zionism in the context of contemporary Jewish identity. The establishment in Zionist thought of the “New Jew” was also part and parcel of a process of “semantic assimilation” to Gentile values that sought to eviscerate the Jewish tradition. Transcending the essential values of Torah Judaism most accurately formulated in Maimonides’ teaching, Zionism was firmly intent on creating a very different understanding of what it means to be Jewish.
In both cases – in Spain and in Zionism – the net effect was to strongly reject the past and its traditions in order to promulgate values quite different from the ethics and pieties of the venerable Jewish heritage.
Ben-Zion Netanyahu and his Zionist cohorts sought to stigmatize rational and scientific thought as not being Jewish while valorizing mystical and anti-rational values as being authentically Jewish. This revaluation has had a decisive – and deleterious – impact on contemporary Judaism......
This integration of Jewish irrationalism into the very heart of contemporary Zionist thought is due in large part to the views of scholars like Netanyahu who successfully made their ideas part of the Israeli educational system and the larger civic culture of the nation.
It is little wonder then that the net result of this intellectual integration has been a culture that is predicated on militancy, as the following obituary states: “Throughout, his views were relentlessly hawkish: he argued that Jews inevitably faced discrimination that was racial and not religious, and that efforts to compromise with Arabs were futile.”
Living in an enchanted world where anti-rational beliefs are the norm, Netanyahu understood the Arab-Israeli conflict through the lenses of the magical and occult. There can never be a rational solution to the conflict because rationalism is anti-Jewish. The mystical is easily translated into the violent. It is an enchanted place where no rational political solution can ever take place. The sword, not the word, is of decisive importance in Netanyahu’s fatalistic epistemology.
Dispensing with the rational, Ben-Zion Netanyahu firmly believed in a deeply radical Right Wing vision of Zionism that was predicated on the values of violence and militancy. His intimate association with the fanatical Revisionist leader Vladimir Jabotinsky spoke to his understanding of politics as an outgrowth of a chillingly occult process.
His benighted and inaccurate scholarship saw the Spanish Inquisition as an existential contest between incompatible essentialized racial identities. This contest was seen through the prism of a primordial tribal agon that could only ever be resolved through death and destruction of the enemy.
That this ideology was – contrary to the vain protestations of his son Benjamin – given importance in elite circles of Israeli political thinking is sad testimony for a Zionism whose roots are part and parcel of a way of seeing and interpreting Jewish history that firmly negates the rich Jewish culture of Sephardic Jewry.
The elevation and eventual triumph of Ashkenazi Judaism in Israeli society is marked by a tradition of anti-rationalism that finds its expression in militant zealotry that often spills over into a blind fanaticism and a siege mentality. It is a culture of suicidal Judaism that remains paranoid and sees itself as being under endless persecution. It is a Judaism that can never have common ground with the Gentile world.
Those are the values that Ben-Zion Netanyahu believed in. These values were transmitted in his writings and discussions to his son, and through his son to the Israeli public and world Jewry as a whole. His outsize influence on Israeli politics has made his death an international matter. He was an important personage whose ideas, however offensive they might have been, have taken on a great significance in our understanding not only of medieval history, but of the current struggle between Israeli Jews and Palestinian Arabs.
It is a legacy of tortured thinking and a profound struggle with the most basic ethical values of a Judaism that he sought to aggressively transform into a corrosively militant ideology which continues to be articulated by the current Israeli Prime Minister and his legion of supporters.
David Shasha
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Also applies to Islamophobia worldwide.
I hated it at the time, but my father's weekly Shabbat afternoon history classes are proving very valuable now.
I hated it at the time, but my father's weekly Shabbat afternoon history classes are proving very valuable now.
